The Perfect Candidate, Faster and Easier Than Expected

“The results that we’ve had so far in 2 months are exceeding what we (thought) we would be seeing after 4 months. The ROI’s already there!” – Greg Heilers

Introduction: 

If anyone knows how tough it can be for a small business to trust someone outside the business to hire a key employee, especially for a fully-remote team, it’s Morgan Taylor and Greg Heilers from Jolly SEO.

 As co-founders of Jolly SEO and veteran leaders in multiple industries, both of them have walked the fine line between doing too much and delegating too much as business owners time and again. 

Now, as Jolly SEO’s popularity and reputation as a consummate link-building service grew, they found they needed another person to whom to delegate; someone who could be the “glue that holds everything together,” according to Greg, in the form of an Operations Manager. 

The Problem: 

This hire was different from past hires, however. 

Unlike filling past roles, which was a matter of “Just bringing up somebody from within the company,” according to Morgan, “We intuitively knew that that was either not going to cut it, or be a compromise or a mistake” for this crucial role. 

This fully-remote Operations Manager, whose role would be to “make sure nothing slips through the cracks and improve everything,” as Greg put it, would be taking over duties the co-founders themselves had handled before. 

This complex set of responsibilities made it essential that this new hire could be both a fresh set of eyes and a wildly competent replacement for Morgan and Greg’s own careful attention to their business. 

As the person stepping into the role of primary caretaker for their “baby” – the small but spunky Jolly SEO brand – the new Operations Manager would have to exceed expectations on every level. 

That’s where Remotivate came in. 

Very quickly, Remotivate was able to weed out unqualified candidates with their proprietary processes and hone in on an excellent candidate for the Jolly SEO co-founders. 

The Remotivate team interviewed the most qualified 9 of the original 72 applicants and narrowed the field to 3 top choices for Greg and Morgan. From there, the Jolly SEO team helped select the final hire.

Greg remarked on how easy and efficient he found the process to be from their side: “It was very hands-off for us, and the quality of candidates was exactly what we needed. You saved us so much time.” 

In just 4 short weeks, a winning candidate emerged, and T.R. Dougherty became Jolly SEO’s new Operations Manager. 

Greg says that T.R. “really exceeded our expectations”, during Remotivate’s pre-hire “strategic test project,” real-world work examples like a 30-60-90 day plan and other strategic exercises designed to test a candidate’s real-world analytical skills. 

Despite needing to pivot the role in the middle of the hiring process from the original “Head of Operations” to the final “Operations Manager” version, Morgan loved that the shift didn’t create additional costs for them. 

“I liked the fact that when we needed to pivot the role, it didn’t increase the cost of the scope.” 

Having been skeptical of recruiting firms in the past due to their “obscured” pricing strategies or “astronomical” fees, according to Greg, Remotivate’s flat fee strategy was like a breath of fresh air. 

“The flat fee and the way that you organized it for different roles at different price points just made so much sense to us – we knew you would do a better job than us, so the ROI’s obvious.” 

The Results: 

In the end, Greg and Morgan’s decision to “take the plunge” and work with a specialized remote recruiting agency like Remotivate instead of hiring for the role themselves gave them a better candidate in less time than they could have hoped for on their own. 

Greg remarked, “I think Morgan and I both think that we should have done this a year earlier.” 

“The whole process has been an amazing experience for us and we’ll definitely recommend you to others.”